Free Republic

An intermittent fasting diet could help protect older people from falls and other injuries by building up their muscles, a study has discovered. Intermittent fasting, also known as time-restricted eating, could also be a cost-efficient intervention to prevent type 2 diabetes, fatty liver disease, and liver cancer, a team from the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California says. Fasting for a longer period could also better protect against infectious diseases like COVID-19 and even save people from dying of sepsis. Intermittent fasting is a dietary regimen that’s growing in popularity. The diet holds people to eating between an eight-hour...

The Ronald Reagan U.C.L.A. Medical Center, one of the nation’s most highly regarded academic hospitals, has earned a reputation as a place where doctors will go to virtually any length and expense to try to save a patient’s life. “If you come into this hospital, we’re not going to let you die,” said Dr. David T. Feinberg, the hospital system’s chief executive. Yet that ethos has made the medical center a prime target for critics in the Obama administration and elsewhere who talk about how much money the nation wastes on needless tests and futile procedures. They like to note...

'Cave man' causes trouble for nursing home A 54-year-old Norwegian man who once lived in a cave and refuses to wash is now creating a health risk at an Oslo nursing home, claim its operators. A local court has ruled, however, that he can't be forced to keep himself clean. A lawyer for the so-called "cave man" (long known as hulemannen in Oslo) told Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK) on Friday that his client was "relieved and very satisfied" by the court ruling in his favour. "He has waited a long time, and can now finally decide over his own body," lawyer...

Marion Bigelow Higgins, recognized as the oldest person in California, has died of congestive heart failure at her home in Leisure World. She was 112. Higgins was recognized as the oldest person in California, the sixth oldest in the United States and the 11th oldest in the world, according to an Orange County Register report on Friday. Officials with the state Department of Aging could not immediately verify Friday whether she was California's oldest person. Funeral arrangements for Higgins, who died Thursday, were pending, relatives said. "She finally began to show her age in recent months after 112 years of...

People who keep up their low-calorie diets may be able to count on more than their waistline shrinking: A new study suggests that the heart's diastolic blood pressure goes down, too. The results bode well for the theory that such diets can prolong lifespan in humans, as dieters' hearts worked as well as those of individuals on a calorie-packed western diet who were 15 years younger. Previous research has shown that caloric restriction increases the lifespans of mice, fruit flies, and the tiny worm Caenorhabditis elegans (ScienceNOW, 2 March 2005). Mice on such diets show improved heart function, indicating caloric...

In 1998 a scientist at the California Institute of Technology discovered a gene that could extend the life of fruit flies by 30%. He dubbed it the Methuselah gene after the Biblical prophet who lived to 969. Now a self-taught gerontologist believes our mortality could one day be similarly extended. At a conference at Queen's College, Cambridge, this week, Aubrey de Grey, a 41-year-old Cambridge computer scientist, told a research audience that there was no reason why people should not live to 1,000. It sounds like science fiction, but for all that Dr de Grey has been dismissed as a...

Controversial theorist Aubrey de Grey insists that we are within reach of an engineered cure for aging. Are you prepared to live forever? On this glorious spring day in Cambridge, England, the heraldic flags are flying from the stone towers, and I feel like I could be in the 17th century—or, as I pop into the Eagle Pub to meet University of Cambridge longevity theorist Aubrey de Grey, the 1950s. It was in this pub, after all, that James Watson and Francis Crick met regularly for lunch while they were divining the structure of DNA and where, in February 1953,...

Life expectancy is increasing in the developed world. But Cambridge University geneticist Aubrey de Grey believes it will soon extend dramatically to 1,000. Here, he explains why. Ageing is a physical phenomenon happening to our bodies, so at some point in the future, as medicine becomes more and more powerful, we will inevitably be able to address ageing just as effectively as we address many diseases today. I claim that we are close to that point because of the SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) project to prevent and cure ageing. It is not just an idea: it's a very...

The curious case of the catatonic biogerontologists The SENS strategy as described here purports to have all the characteristics that should make it persuasive: it's detailed, it's thorough and it's all firmly based on established experimental work in the various relevant areas of biology. So, you may well ask, where's the catch? Why, on all the many documentaries on aging that remain so popular, don't my colleagues come out and advocate the work that I advocate? There are three main reasons why most mainstream gerontologists remain so conspicuously absent from the growing band of vocal advocates of the SENS approach...

(Note: The original article is replete with in-text links and visual aids; please visit it in order to access those links.) SENS is a practical, foreseeable approach to curing aging because all the types of metabolic side-effect whose accumulation is (or is even hypothesised to be) eventually pathogenic are amenable to repair (or in some cases obviation, i.e. disruption of the mechanism by which they become pathogenic) by techniques that, according to the experimentalists who have performed the key work on which those techniques build, can (with adequate funding) probably be implemented in mice within a decade or so. There...

(Note: The original article is replete with in-text links; please visit it in order to access those links.) What is Engineered Negligible Sensecence? "It's not a very catchy name, is it?" you may be thinking. Yes, I know -- "Engineered Negligible Senescence" has ten syllables and is not the world's most memorable, or indeed self-explanatory, phrase. But it is a good name for our ultimate goal, honest -- as well as SENS being a catchy acronym. Here's an explanation. I'm afraid it starts with a rather long preamble, but trust me, it's worth it. First, let's be precise: our ultimate...

MINSK, Belarus - A woman believed to be the oldest in the world celebrated her 116th birthday Wednesday in the former Soviet republic of Belarus. "I'll drink to my own health with pleasure," said Hanna Barysevich, a former farm worker who lives in a house outside the Belarusian capital Minsk. "I'm tired of living already, but God still hasn't collected me," she said with a smile. Barysevich was born on May 5, 1888, in the village of Buda, 37 miles east of Minsk, according to her passport. Her parents were poor, landless peasants. "From my early childhood I didn't know...